Share this:

John, Craig and I used to meet mulitple times a week in front of a projector screen to watch good films, bad films, action films. Of everything that we watched – Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hercules in New York and The Villain included – no one provided us with more entertainment than Paul Verhoeven. His films were good, bad and action all at once.

That’s why I look at Infested Planet and get a little thrill from its Starship Trooperisms. It’s a top-down strategy-lite in which a small squad of soldiers can mow down thousands of chitinous alien bugs. It looks slightly less satirically fascist, but from up here, I can pretend every single soldier is Casper Van Dien.

It’s been in Early Access for a while, but is super-available to ultra-buy come its full-release on March 6th. New trailer below.

It’s bound to be better than the inevitable Starship Troopers remake, anyway.

Alec liked it when he took a look at its beta in the middle of last year. I tend to enjoy real-time strategy games which simplify the standard glut of mechanics, so if this is a little bit tower defence-y, a little Cannon Fodder-y, then it’s alright by me. I’ll fire my proboscis deep inside it to extract critical thoughts before release.

I really really wish Hollywood would stop trying to remake Verhoeven movies. There’s not a director around today that can do what he did. That is, to make surprisingly insightful social commentary and satire wrapped up in a cheesy as hell, yet endlessly entertaining package.

If he only managed a single good movie then you could write it off as dumb luck or coincidence, but Verhoeven did it not just once (Robocop), but again (Total Recall), and again (Basic Instinct), and again (Starship Troopers). You don’t create that much awesomeness by accident. There is an art to doing what he did.

The weird thing is that when people who don’t understand the point of the movie – which was intended to make the book’s politics look completely ridiculous – talk about it being “unfaithful” to the book, they always mean “no robot suits” rather than “no Filipinos”

I very much enjoy Infested Planet. The way the bugs add new traits means that your first couple of hives are cakewalks, but by the end you’re coming up with new techniques for each hive. An earlier version I played until it ran out of content got a bit easy when you advance behind a moving line of turrets, but one I played more recently had some bugs evolve exoskeletons that reflect bullets, making my turret line into a self-immolating disaster, which was fun.

You’ll need flamethrower for that, short range but effective. Then the spitter came out and decimate them and everything go downhill after that. I think it would be fun if they add flame turret, still died to spitter though

As soon as the armored bugs and spitters spawn at the same time the game demand more micro management and you can’t just run & gun to their hives anymore, spawn timing and air support become essential. Medic is a must. Thank god for that pause button.

The book is not intentionally satirical. Heinlein was pretty much just writing about a future society that he thought would be pretty neat (and, according to others, was also pretty fascistic). This was not particularly out of line with Heinlein’s other social and political views .

Agree. The book was there, shaking its little fist at the clouds and the youth, in its little corner of s.f. People who liked that also liked Frank Miller, Ayn Rand, the NRA and the Federalist Papers. An obscure and fine piece of american weird.

Then Verhoeven came and made a movie that could be liked equally by the Heinlein fans and the normals. That doesn’t make it a satire of Heinlein – it’s just that it’s a movie clever that way.

That catch : the marketing b.s. (“it’s ironic, don’t worry”) around the movie was the first – and oftentimes only – exposition of many to Heinlein. So you can still today hear about that anti-war satire movie (hum) and book (w.t.f.). It’s (arguably) not, and it’s not.